I used to look in that mirror and try to focus on the tiny words of a distant hope in that small corner amidst the pain and devastation that encompassed my being.
The eyes I no longer recognized as my own would drift over to those words every morning and night, sinking with every letter, belief remaining completely invisible.
They stopped briefly and met his, unrecognizable through the blur of tears that had become all too custom, only because he forced them to in his desperation to pull me out from under the suffocating cloak of misery.
I looked back long enough to let him save me, but never really saw them.
Those same eyes watched the faces of mediocrity fade in and out from day to day, discerning nothing, stopping for nothing, holding out for nothing.
The images had never moved more slowly, yet they had never missed more, everything seen yet left unseen.
But then there was you.
You stopped my eyes in their tracks of desperate defenses.
And they met yours.
What was it about them? Was it the blue, the brightness shining in a world that someone else had left painted gray? Or was it the gray buried beneath that matched the color of that world of my own, a piece of you that you shared with me left behind from a pain that you deserved no more than I did?
Or was it the glimmer of hope that neither of us had known in ages, so distant and unrecognizable that it left us chasing after the distant figure in an attempt to touch it just once? To touch each other just once. It was a force so strong that it drove us toward each other, fighting from day one. I don’t think either of us knew quite what we were fighting for. But we did know that there was something missing from our eyes, from our souls, and we knew the other just might have what we needed, a broken piece that fit perfectly into the one we had been carrying for far too long, finally freeing us from those jagged edges and the defenses we’d built to protect ourselves against them.
